A Cross-Disciplinary Language for Change Propagation Rules

Automated production systems are in operation for a long time and are continuously being changed. Therefore, for these systems it is important to have the ability to react efficiently to changes. Change propagation analysis approaches allow predicting the effects of changes before they are actually implemented. Such approaches often use predefined change propagation rules that indicate how the change propagates in a system. However, the change propagation rules used by these approaches are limited to a discipline such as information systems, to the structure of system elements in a discipline, or to a programming language such as Java. In this paper, we present a cross-disciplinary language to specify change propagation rules. The proposed language is independent of a particular discipline, structure of system elements, or programming languages. To show the improvement of the readability and the coverage of the change propagation rules with our language, we apply it to two existing approaches to change propagation analysis for the electronic and mechanical components, as well as control software of automated production systems.